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I also have a personal argument for the laptops; the quality of my public education, at least for me, was shoddy at best. Teachers at my schools were horrible at what they did; I'd say about 5% of my graduating class from high school were even taught calculus and approximately 75% of all students could barely do algebra I.

but imagine what the kid learns when they play King's Quest (and other adventure games with the verbal command prompt)

This issue was very thoughtfully covered in Strong Bad Email 47.

I blame the Thnikkaman for that!

Pfft, go all the way. Keyswordtar hero!

You also forgot the exits:
DENNIS
NOT DENNIS
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail94.html

System report: Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined.

The analogy you've presented is not accurate. You are comparing two different machines (human and PS3) meant for two very different tasks. Even so, if you set up a robot with a pen and paper to render a scene, it would take a while too. This is not a processor problem, it's an IO bottleneck due to your skills of an artist. Your brain can render that image just fine, in fact it can do it at a much higher resolution for a wider field of view.

When it comes to raw processing speed, the human brain kicks the living shit out of anything we have today, or will ever have in my opinion. The fact is, your eyes and brain work together to render those images as fast as the PS3 can spit them out. In addition, your brain is also processing all the peripheral information required to let you know something is flying at your head when you beat your buddy in a game, or that your hot pockets are getting done in the microwave.

In other words:

While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina's real-time performance goes unchallenged. Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (one hundredth of a second) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second.
~John Stevens, Byte magazine (April 1985)

Sure, 32 bit integer manipulation is a little slow on a human, but for real-time sensory processing and precise reactions an F1 Driver, Baseball Player or [whatever] would be hard to beat.

GarageBad? Does that happen to be the software StrongBad uses to compose music?

Here's the origin.

It's not a nonsense string of characters. Er......well, it is. Yet it does have a meaning. Everybody to the Limit

If Gone With The Wind or Cinderella were not created by their respective authors, then those works are just simply not there at all

Huh?

Disney's an outstanding example of source material from the public domain being critical to "new" art. Financial incentives probably help, but they can't explain why the internet produced creative works, or why they still shoot films in countries with a thriving bootleg industry. Exposure is the artist's hurdle to financial sustainability, not being ripped off. In the rare case of commercial idea-stealing, public outcry tends to be swift and career-wrecking. I think it's absurd the Congressional mandate to promote progress now extends to protecting any multinational business's brand image.

Ah, then that means Homestar is dumber than a fish.

"Then what's two plus two?"
"Well, the force between any two charges is equal to the absolute value of the multiple of the charges divided by 4 pi times the vacuum permittivity times the distance squared between the two charges."

I leech off my geeky nerdy neighbor and his DNS Domain Typo page leads to

http://www.homestarrunner.com/404.html

He has the best ISP by a long shot!!!

"Technology as magic" is a well explored theme - from quotes such as "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" to Babylon 5.

My favourite description of technology, though, is Strongbad's here: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail143.html

I prefer to tase the gnome (hint: click on work at the end).

The best 404 ever

404'd!

(yes, that means pulling hostile country SWF money in line as well)

(yes, that means pulling hostile country SWF money in line as well)

Hopefully this will be the blank media that The Dethemberween Thnikkaman puts in my slippers this year.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/disk4of12.html ... all your base has belong to I

The rest of the games at homestarrunner are pretty good too.

The rest of the games at homestarrunner are pretty good too.

Not just the best Flash game, but possibly the best use of flash in the history of time!

http://www.homestarrunner.com/disk4of12.html

Incorrect, at least in the US. Trademarks work more or less like copyright; they are automatic upon use of the mark to trade goods or services (service marks).

Kyle "the Yellow Dart" Smith soon to file a lawsuit
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html

I agree, and I want to add: if you can block the ads, do it. Don't listen to the shills who say that "ads pay for the service". If they do, it is accidental. The primary goal of advertising is always to educate the consumer, never to offset the costs. If you are as much as enjoying the service, block the ads and don't think twice about it. It is not your fault that the seller has decided to bet on advertising, nor is it your obligation to keep him afloat.

Bitching about ads is silly, since many modern consumer products wouldn't even exist without a powerful marketing effort. If you really must play games that cost $100M to make--if you believe that only a vast amount of money can make a great game--then please, suck it up and watch the ads. This may seem to contradict what I have said before, but it doesn't. I, for one, could not care less if the game is cheap, as long as it is fun to play, nor do I believe that the cost makes things better when it comes to art or entertainment. So I block the ads. By blocking the ads (or refusing to buy the service) a consumer expresses the preference for an economy in which marketing plays but a minor role. It would be a vastly different economy, for sure, with very different products. For example, all music downloads would be like BT, news would be like Usenet, online shopping like craigslist, cartoons like HSR, TV like youtube. I do not know what the games would be like; I am doubtful that they would have development costs in millions of dollars, but I am pretty damn sure that they would be just as entertaining as the best, most expensive games of today.

Homestarrunner.net! It's dot com!

http://www.askaninja.com/ and http://www.homestarrunner.com/.

Sure, slashdot, maybe, but that's just so people can validate my sense of humor and I can troll liberals.

If you haven't already, give Peasant Quest a go. It helps if you have an appreciation for Trogdor.

Wow. I don't know which is scarier - the possibility that you missed the joke because it was over your head, or the possibility that such a load of drivel sounded reasonable enough to you for you to debate the issue.

Either way, I'm scared.

David Bowie, dude... American... History... Geography..

Head Asplode! :D

The worst part for y'all is, someone set us up the bomb and we are not afraid of using it. Be afraid, be very very afraid :D.

Says the guy whose signature looks like a USB dongle goblin that upgraded to a plasma blaster.

And for Strong Bad's take on the quality of bad old games...

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail94.html/

Ohhhhh, if you want it to be possessive, it's just "I-T-S"
But if it's supposed to be a contraction, then it's "I-T-apostrophe-S".
Scalawag.

( http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail89.html )

Some soft drinks may damage your DNA Evidence http://www.homestarrunner.com/DNA.html

Yes, there are *some* people who will not produce information-products (including software, music, images, or what-have-you) if they cannot globally enforce copy restrictions. Agreed. Such people should, IMO, go in to a different line of work. That is perfectly acceptable for a very simple reason: there will be more than enough people who find good reasons to produce such works in the absence of copyright restrictions. Some people will find an alternative means of making money off freely-duplicated works, and others just because they are altruistic.

Remember that people pay good money for their hardware, and copyright restrictions mean they cannot make full use of it. Copyright isn't actually a "freedom" for the person producing a work....people will still be completely free to produce works without copyright restrictions. Copright may be a "benefit" to the producers of a work (though in practice it is not; it is only a benefit to the distributors of the work, but I won't get into that here), but to call it a "freedom" is incorrect. Copyright law is a restriction on freedom to everyone in the world, and if such a freedom is going to be globally sacrificed, there had better be a damn good reason for it.

The only reason you have given is the false premise that without these restrictions, no-one will produce knowledge-products. Not only is this false in theory (since some people will produce stuff for free, and since some people will find ways of making money off knowledge-products in the absence of copyright restrictions), but there are lots of examples of businesses that make money off a free end-product, and of profoundly useful products made without any profit motive. And there are more where those came from.

That last set of links is pretty important. Google gives all of its services away for free, and yet has a market cap of over 100 billion. Not only are there business models built around free products, but they are very profitable and fiercely competitive.

Also check out this and this. Copyright is still there, but it is unenforced upon the consumer. It will be interesting to see how this selective approach to enforcement will pan out.

It is true that a farmer who gives away his crops for free would go broke, and if farmers could not legally force people to pay for their products then there would be no farmers. However, this observation not apply to information products. Information is fundamentally different from physical products, and business models surrounding it wind up taking a different form than traditional business models (a form which includes a free and/or freely redistributable product).

What we are dealing with is a new kind of abundance. Oxygen is an abundant resource, (anyone can get it for free because it just never runs out). Traditional capitalistic wisdom says that it is not possible to build a business around such resources, and further that no one will produce them because of that. Information is also abundant, once it exists (since it can be duplicated at zero cost by anyone). But it is also strangely non-abundant, since it's initial production requires an expenditure of resources. Traditional capitalistic models have a very hard time categorizing it...is it abundant or isn't it? Copyright law is an attempt at forcing it in to the "limited" category so that the traditional models wil

...the system is down.

On a more serious note, FTA, "By opening the document, the employee activated hidden software commands establishing what Reid described as backdoor communications with the hackers."

This is why Word document software should not automatically run a scripting engine. Unfortunately, the article does not say what version of Word or Office were used. Should we assume all are suspectible?

YouTube (and google video) has worked since the beta in December. There was even a site created to help autoformat it so all videos display nicer on the Wii. This is just a front end to YouTube's site so you can bypass it if you don't care for how they are formatting it. Of note Strongbad, and Foamy work great too.

Does it handle streaming audio/video?

The beta didn't do shoutcast, but I have been using Finetune for quite some time.

Just out of curiosity, how is making $0 per user on millions of users more valuable than making $1 per user on a few hundred users? You aren't a venture capitalist from 1999, are you?

How about the entire site of Homestar Runner? The various games and cartoons there are loaded with Easter Egg features, which get cataloged obsessively here.

Podcasts are the worst. One hour of audio that contains roughly the amount of information that would fit on one A4 page. But instead of downloading a few kBs of text and reading it in five minutes you get a file of several megabytes that takes a looong time to listen to. Never mind that in the age of multimedia you can put images or even videos to illustrate something in your text instead of talking for five minutes to explain what you mean. You can't easily skip uninteresting bits in a podcast like you can in a text since there are no visible paragraphs. Also the usual complaints about radio still apply to podcasts.

Sewwiously. I don't know why Microsoft doesn't (appear to) invest in static analysis in their code... Imagine outputting a to-do list with, say, *every* freaking buffer overflow exploit in the Windows code tree.

One of the Strong Bad toons on Homestar Runner did something similar. HRWiki says they apparently changed the tune to Hot Cross Buns though for the DVD. Hmmm...

Like this? http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail152.html

Can I have your account number or identity theft please?

grammar tip!
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail89.html

STRONG BAD: {singing} I got the email, you got the email, I got the email, you got the email.

ert+
y76p; '01uBjykee;u4p;e'/Rh
Strong ba15456`-------++++++gf
+++++-//==========/*8901ikg

{Pronounces "Ert plus: Why seven-six P? Ohlyuu eightguh--" then stops}

STRONG BAD: What is this? Did the quadratic formula explode? I see a "Strong ba" in there, but it's getting eaten... by some... Linux or something. Wait a minute! Is this one of those virus emails?! Like the kind that moms and offshore casinos send you?!? I'll take care of this!

-- Strong Bad in Virus

{"The Cheat presents" on a black background appears on the screen, followed by two green, bean-shaped eyes.}

STRONG BAD: Check it out, those are supposed to be my eyes, I think.

{The eyes fade and the letters "SB" appear. "Strong" and "Bad" are inside each letter}

STRONG BAD: That stands for my name.

{The "S" and "B" turn into "The Web" in cursive}

STRONG BAD: "The Web".

{"The Web" turns into "Welcomes 'u' '2'", the letters made of only horizontal and vertical lines. The words "strong bad's cybersite" appear in red below "Welcomes 'u' '2'". A rainbow circle about 3/4 the size of the "2" comes and rolls in, stopping at the quotation mark before the "2"}

STRONG BAD: That little rainbow thing's kinda cool.

{The word "cybersite" turns into rainbow colors. The words exit and a blackhole-like thing appears.}

STRONG BAD: Oh, go through the tunnel, oh look out!

{As he says "Oh, look out!", a hand appears to punch you, and after it does, the word "OUCH!" appears above it. The words "Get on in!" appear in a long button.}

STRONG BAD: Oh, you got punched! Aw, man, right in the face. {typing} Okay, next on the checklist: lots of animated GIFs! {pronounces it /gifs/; stops typing} or... GIFs... {pronounces it /jifs/} or however you say it. I don't know. I heard a couple of nerds arguing about it one time. {clears screen} But you want as many of those as possible.

{An animated GIF appears that cycles between a flame, the word "Fire!" and another flame.}

STRONG BAD: Especially the {Another GIF appears, featuring a mouse that looks side to side before revealing a letter labeled "INTERNET?" in its mouth.} rotate-y kind. {Two rotating GIFs appear, one of a guitar, the other of a diamond that flashes, showing the words "hi rez" which then disappear.} Those are awesome, man. Nobody gets tired of looking at those. {clears screen}

STRONG BAD: {typing} So, then you can pretty much just pick whatever for your subject. It doesn't really matter as long as you got the rest of that stuff on there. {stops typing} I mean, {resumes typing} James, the Internet is a place where absolutely nothing happens. You need to take advantage of that. {stops typing}I mean, you can make a webpage of your cat.

{A picture of a cat lying on a football with red eye thinking "It's 4th and 10. Now WHERE'S MY SUPPER?!?" appears}

STRONG BAD: or your The Cheat.

{A picture of The Cheat sleeping on a couch on his back on a couch thinking "It's 4th and 10. I hate cats."}

STRONG BAD: And, {typing} Who knows? Maybe tomorrow you'll be really big in Pakistan. Or at least, with some guy named Stan. {Stops typing} Anyways, I gotta go work on my webpage.

Transcript from: http://www.hrwiki.org/index.php/website

Video from: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail51.html